...And Down The Stretch They Come! MLB enters the home stretch

I just finished watching the Braves win with a walk-off home run from Justin Upton, and while baseball is still fresh in my brain, and before I switch my brain into English Premier League mode, I feel like I should type about baseball.  I think it's time to take a look around the leagues quick and see what's up.  

But before we look at the standings, remember Antonio Alfonseca?  That dude had six fucking fingers.  

Anyway...

 Fun.

Prediction for the AL?  I think it ends up being exactly as it is right now.  Perhaps Oakland will win the west, and Texas makes the wild card game, but that's about all I'd change.  

National League!!!!

Also fun, but maybe not as fun.  

The Dodgers and Braves have insurmountable leads.  The Reds are surging, the Cardinals are bleeding and the Pirates are hanging in there.  To me, the National League is a five team race already.  It will end up exactly how it is, and that's the way it should be.  Arizona has no business in the postseason this year. Neither do the Gnats.  

Three quarters of the season is over already.  I'm not one to advocate the watching of American League games often, but now I must do so.  There's just so much left to be decided out there.  Alright, have a good day, and go Arsenal! 

Starters for 6/23/13 Around the MLB

I'd like to do this daily, but I doubt I will.  I will do this as often as I can, because I think it's interesting, at least.

It's Sunday, and you know what that means!  That means every team in all of Baseball is in action today.  Looking at the schedule, I noticed that there is only four games on the schedule tomorrow, so set your fantasy rosters accordingly.  But lets not get ahead of ourselves here, let's focus on today's games.

Here's the starting pitchers for today, as of this writing:

 As you can see here, there's a few interesting match ups today, but mostly I see a lot of mismatches.  Samardzija vs Jordan Lyles, perhaps?  But then you stop and realize it's the Astros vs the Cubs, so that's not interesting.  The one that pops out to me is Mat Latos and the Reds against the (still) first place Diamondbacks and Randal Delgado.  Former Atlanta Brave Delgado was part of the Justin Upton trade.  I've been to three Braves games in my life.  The starting pitchers for those Braves games were John Smoltz, Tim Hudson...and Randal Delgado.  You can imagine which one the Braves lost, right?  Yeah, but anyway, he's made two appearances and one start for the Diamondbacks this season.  That one start was this past Tuesday evening, where gave up eight hits and two runs while striking out six over seven innings against the suddenly resurgent(?!) Miami Marlins.  By all accounts, a solid outing.  He was given a no-decision but the DBacks won on a Paul Goldschmidt walk-off home run.  Delgado was a top prospect in the Braves organization before sputtering out in his chance in the majors, and ultimately dealt to Arizona along with a number of other prospects and my beloved Martin Prado for Justin Upton, a trade that at this point has been won by Atlanta, I think.  But Delgado has an upside.  At first, it seemed to be a trade of Prado for Upton, but who knows?  Maybe Delgado will thrive in Arizona and somewhere down the line, we'll be asking ourselves "They traded him for HIM?!?"  I guess a lot of that future began last Tuesday, and continues today against the Reds and their highly touted offense, led by my fantasy hero, Joey Votto.  

(no one cares about my or your fantasy team...remember that in the future.)

Other pitching highlight today is the next start from the electric Matt Harvey.  It's against the Phillies, so you never know how that will go.  

Highly touted pitching prospect TBD (awful parents for naming their child that!) gets the start for Baltimore

I'm very interested to see what Matt Cain does today against the Marlins.  His starts have all kinds of inconsistent numbers lately.  We'll have to see which Matt Cain shows up today.  He has a 7.22 ERA in day games, but I don't know how many day games he's pitched.  I know he got lit up by St. Louis in a day game, and I'm sure that's probably throwing that number off.  Anyway, We shall see. 

Joe Blanton will go for his 11th loss today.  Cole Hammels got his on Friday night.  At least Hammels has more than one win, however.  Ouch.

Adam Wainwright pitches tonight. Not a good pitching match up though, so it don't get featured here.  It just gets mentioned at the end.  

So enjoy the games today and mostly, enjoy the pitching.  

If a Tree Falls...

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, does it actually make a sound?

If I craft a baseball blog in the woods, would anyone read it?  What about in a city?

Welcome everyone to Safety Squeeze, a baseball blog no one bothers to read.  I could write the greatest baseball post of all time, with sweeping coverage and analysis, written with the grace of great poets, covering of all 30 major league teams with in-depth coverage of all the results and stories from each game, previews of all the next days action and perhaps the stories that might otherwise fall through the cracks, but it matters not; no one will be reading.  Why do I write anyway?  Because I don't care if no one reads it.  I just want to write it.

With that being said, let's talk about baseball.  Yasiel Puig of the Los Angeles Dodgers has debuted this week with a splash, hitting four homeruns in four games.  That's special, but I wish he wasn't hitting clutch homers against the Braves.  He grand slam on Thursday night to extend the games lead to 5 runs, and he broke a 1-1 tie in the late innings on Friday night to set up extra innings, where the Dodgers won on a walk-off wild pitch.  Great.  I know that baseball is a marathon not a sprint, and losing two games in Los Angeles in early June is nothing to cry about in the long run, but as a competitive fan, I don't like to see my team lose. It's going to happen, and they say that if you don't like losing, you shouldn't be involved with baseball, but I sure wouldn't mind it the Atlanta Braves would go 162-0.

Last time I wrote here I wrote about Jeremy Bonderman and his return to the majors after a three year absence due to many horrible health ailments.  I wrote about how wonderful it would be if we all watched to see how the man performed.  Well, I didn't watch the game.  I watched Bonderman record one out, to end an inning, and I don't even remember how that out was recorded or what inning it was.  I got busy when I got home, okay?  The Mariners got beat that day, I don't know, something like 10-1 and Bonderman seems to have pitched like someone who hasn't pitched to big leaguers in three years.  I don't know for sure, like I said, I didn't watch the game.  I read the line, and it seems as if that was the case.  Anyway, he got another start on Friday, and he beat the slumping Yankees, so that's cool.  Good job, Jeremy.  I didn't watch that game either, or even watch any highlights yet, because it's just hard for me to watch Mariners baseball.

It was brought to my attention last weekend that there is a treasure trove of classic baseball games on a YouTube page called MLB Classics.  I've included a hyperlink there to the page.  Anyway, I decided to check it out this past Monday, since there were no day games and I had watched most of the previous day's Braves game so I needed some sort of baseball to watch.  There are many old, black and white games, mostly from World Series' and such.  But the one that caught my eye was the first ever game for the Florida Marlins against the Los Angeles Dodgers on April 5th, 1993.  Chris Berman was on the mic doing play-by-play for the game that aired on ESPN that opening day.  One thing I noticed is that a younger Chris Berman was a lot more...how do you say...uniform in his delivery as a play-by-play man.  I mean to say, he sounded more formulaic than what he is these days, which is Schticky, and gimmicky. That was nice.  Anyway, I couldn't help but notice and comment on Twitter about the Marlins horrible (in retrospect) decision to wear teal.  There was this fascination of new pro sports teams to use new, rarely seen color schemes when debuting in the 90's.  Not just in baseball, but in all sports.  Teal was exceptionally popular a color, with the Jacksonville Jaguars, San Jose Sharks and the Marlins all debuting in the 90's with that color.  The Jaguars have since shifted to a dark green, and the Marlins are primarily orange and black these days, but the Sharks are still riding high, wavin' the flag of team teal, and I got to respect that.  Also, purple was popular.  The Rockies and Diamondbacks wore purple.  Anyway, this isn't supposed to be a rant on color choices of teams, it's about the Marlins.  The thing that stood out about the teal color is their weird teal batting helmets.  They looked so weird, like an eraser head or something.  They made everyone's head seem bigger and more cumbersome.  I also liked that the first opening day pitcher for the Marlins was 45 year old veteran knuckleballer Charlie Hough.  Seeing a 45 year old man wear a teal hat throw a knuckleball at a young Mike Piazza or Eric Karros, truly something to behold.  Another thing, I know they've only been out of the football stadium for one full season now, but watching them play there that day, it had this temporary feel to it, like they would play in Joe Robbie stadium for a couple seasons and then get their own park like a lot of other expansion teams have done (Mets, Nationals for example) yet it took almost 20 years to get it done. I'm not going to make any sort of sweeping analysis of baseball in Florida (or any sports in Florida for that matter) but as long as I've been watching baseball, Marlins baseball has always felt the weirdest.  Their opening day game in 1993 was no different.  I only watched the first three of four innings, and then went off and did other things, but I'd seen enough to know that it felt awkward, and would feel awkward for the rest of my baseball watching life.  I guess that's a sweeping analysis, isn't it?  For some reason, even though they played in that mammoth stadium as recently as 2011, it was strange to see baseball being played in what is obviously a football stadium, even though teams like the A's do it 82 times a season.  I don't know, it felt off.

Okay, that's all.  Enjoy today's games.  Enjoy that YouTube page.  Have a good day, and let's all hope for a no-no this weekend, eh?  Or a cycle?  Both?  For the Padres?  By the same guy?  After all, it is the National League, the one league where a guy could conceivably pitch a no-hitter and also hit for the cycle in the same game.  Anything is possible in the National League!

Advanced stats

There are a lot of advanced stats out there.  SABRmetrics, or whatever.  Listen, this all might just be coming from a place where I have a lack of understanding on the subject, but I don't really put a whole lot of stock in advanced stats.  That might sound weird, but I just think there are other ways of determining if a guy is a good baseball player or not.  Like, oh I don't know, watching a game.  I'm way more of an eyeball test kind of guy.  Does he look alright?  Then he's alright, isn't he? Guys get hot, guys get cold.  It comes and goes.  Everyone goes through this. I'll tell you right now, after writing this mini rant that I've been planning in my head, I'm going to go and search on Google "how to read and decipher advanced stats" and see if I can change my own mind on the subject.  But as of right now, I think fancy stats are only good for three things.  Number one is obviously fantasy baseball.  It's good to know if a guy is playing over his head or underachieving compared to what he usually does so you can win your fantasy league.  But this reason directly leads me to the number two and three reasons for using fancy stats for baseball is to sound smart, and to be right.  For me, I don't put much stock in being right all the time.  I've lost hundreds of arguments with my wife because I just don't care if I'm right.  She has to be right, it's in her nature.  It's part of what makes her special because she's determined to be right and smart and respected.  Me, I don't care.  I just want to get along with everyone and have a conversation about baseball.  Taht's why this blog exists.  I'm not going to (be able) to tell you that Tyler Lyons has a stranded runner rate of 91% because I looked it up.  I'll tell you that because the Sleeper and the Bust podcast told me that.  I had already dropped him anyway, but that helps the decision feel like the right one.  Is that a fancy stat?  Not really, that's a pretty regular stat, and I probably would have been able to tell you this stat if I had actually watched the Cardinals play for the past 15 days.

What I have watched is Atlanta Braves baseball, and I don't need fancy stats to tell you that Justin Upton had a terrible May, but his numbers don't look all that bad because he had an amazing April.  I know this because I've only missed a couple Braves games all year.  I know this team.  I don't know Cardinals very well.  I don't know Astros or Mariners or Yankees or Angels or really most of the league unless they've played the Braves.  I haven't watched any of their games more than an inning or two this year.  This is where I need people that read into fancy stats to tell me what they're doing.  Why do I run a baseball blog, anyway?

That brings me to my final point here.  What does advanced stats do for me as a fan?  Not as a fantasy baseball team owner, but as a fan of the Atlanta Braves and of baseball watching in general, how does knowing Dan Uggla's BABIP (if I knew what it was) change the way I feel every time he strikes out or flies out or grounds out or walks....which is all he does...Or hit a home run.  If Dan Uggla could just start hitting doubles I'd be impressed.  But he just doesn't.  And I don't need to look at any type of advanced stat to know he's not had a good year.  Knowing advanced stats does very, very little for me as a fan watching games.  What I care about is wins, strikeouts, hits, home runs, web gems, double plays, no-hitters, disputed calls, weird pitching wind-ups, weird pitching deliveries, 17 inning games, position players pitching, catchers throwing their masks off to make a catch on a popup behind the plate, "is a hit or is it an error?" yada yada yada.  Fancy stats are for people that don't watch baseball games.  That's my conclusion.  If that's the way you want to experience this game, then go for it.  Do whatever you want, but I'll just watch the game.  

Baseball Will Crush Your Soul With Pain and Agony

If you have followed baseball the past couple seasons, you should know that no lead in the standings is safe.  One team may seam nearly assured of upcoming post season action, and have it slip away in just a few short weeks, or days, even. Let's take a look at some of the recent collapses around the end of the season.

Exhibit A:  The 2007 New York Mets

This is one of the most LOL-worthy collapses in baseball history.  The Mets held a seven-game lead in the NL east on September 12th, and proceeded to lose 12 of their last 17 games and miss the playoffs altogether.  They lost five out of six against the horrible Nationals, and then, just when they had a chance to stave off this unreal collapse, all they had to do was beat the last place Florida Marlins on the last day of the season...and got smoked 6-1. The Phillies won the division, and the Mets went home.





Exhibit B: The 2009 Detroit Tigers

Oof.  Painful, this one was.  The Tigers were atop the Central for the better part of the season, and when it came down to the final weekend of the season, they held a three-game lead on September 30th.  By October 6th, just six days later, their season was Chinese food.  They were cooked cat.  They were delicious, I heard.  But at least out of the disaster that the collapse, we got Game 163, one of the best baseball games of all time.  Ups and downs, drama, extra innings, heroes left and right.  Good times.  And then the Twins got squashed by the Yankees, the eventual champs, but you know, that's not important here.  What's important is that even on the last weekend of the season, anything can and will happen.

Exhibit C: The 2011 Atlanta Braves and Boston Red Sox

And this one stings the worst of them all.  I can poke fun these other teams failures, but when it happens to my own team, my beloved Braves, it's no goddamn laughing matter, goddamn it.

Yup.  10 1/2 game lead on August 26th.  Still at 8 1/2 on September 6th, yet only went 9-18 in September. The final blow came on a blown save against the Phillies on that historic last day of the regular season.  I remember now why I hate the Phillies.  I tried as hard as I could to block this whole thing from my memory, but now that I'm writing about it, the wounds are still open, even if I've covered them with bandages for the time being.  I barely watched the rest of the post season because I was so jaded.  The Cardinals beat the Astros that day, and won the National League wild card.  The Braves went home.  UUUUGGGHHHH...however the spotlight on the Braves failure was dimmed a bit because it was being shared by another historic collapse.  Red.  Sox.  Nation.

As far as the Red Sox go, that might have been even worse than the Braves, actually.  They blew a nine-game lead over the Rays with 25 left to play.  That's huge.  Huge huge huge.  Also, on that last day of the season, the one I called historic in the above paragraph, the Red Sox were playing the nearly 100-loss team in the Baltimore Orioles, and all they had to do was win, and lost on a walk-off single.  Meanwhile, in Tampa, the Rays were playing the Yankees.  The Yankees took a 7-0 lead into the 8th inning, for cryin' out loud.  The Rays mounted a miraculous comeback of the ages, culminating in Dan Johnson's game-tying one-strike away from season over, home run.  Then Evan Longoria hit a solo shot in the 12th, just minutes after that Baltimore dagger to the heart of Red Sox Nation. The Rays were in and the Sox were out.  Unbelievable.  Hell, I'm mostly writing this as a way for me to remember what happened on that day.  All this stuff in the AL east, coupled with the Braves v.s. Phillies, and the Cardinals needing a win to keep their hopes of the post season alive, it's just incredible that this all happened at once.  And out of all of that, the least dramatic of the dramatic stuff was the Cardinals, and they ended up winning the whole thing...and they barely made the playoffs.  Insanity.

So if this season finishes anything close to what we got last season, we're in for quite a ride.  I can only hope it goes the right way this year, and these Braves don't screw it up this time.  But even if they do, the wounds will eventually heal, and I'll have a great blog post to write, won't I?